Keraunophobia
by sayurinomoe
Summary: They say lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but it's just extremely rare. If odds are in your favor, the shock will wear off, you will start to recover from something you didn't even see coming. You could still have a shot at surviving. She wanted to heal from her phobia. ... And he was her only choice. [Kakashi/Sakura] [Angsty/Dysfunctional Sasuke/Sakura]


_**Author's Note:**_

Read this before going ahead, please.

This time I had to put Author's Note at the beginning of the story for a special reason: even if there are Sasuke and Sarada in this, as stated in the info panel above, what is described here is definitely **_not_** an happy family. It is described as **_dysfunctional, sad and emotionally draining_**. _If you're a fan of Sasuke/Sakura, this story is not suited for you_. This is definitely not Sasu/Saku, it's Kaka/Saku. So please, respect the main pairing involved.

Deni, thank you. You're my personal guru.

* * *

It shouldn't have ended like this, but it was too late to avoid it now.

It happened naturally, and it was fast, needy and exasperated, and both of them soon found themselves unable to stop what was happening, nor did they really want to.

They were filling their own voids, and it felt so right and pleasurable that they kept on doing this, over and over - each time that she sought him to talk and relieve the stress of her days, or when she met him to keep on doing their strange and unexplainable "therapy".

And he always obliged because deep in the core, he liked the physical act; the woman wriggling under his ministrations, fogged by a strange sort of camaraderie mixed with traces of guilt left to rot in their past relationship.

Lips against lips, teeth grazing skin usually covered by clothes that shouldn't have really been taken off in the first place, was all that was on their mind in those particularly heated moments. For those brief instances, cutting any ties with their present selves became a desire that needed to be satisfied, and here they were, tangling in his sheets, moaning and grunting like wild mating animals in that cramped dark room that was his bedroom.

In those few minutes, when their heads filled to the brink with thoughts about their unsatisfying lives and hearts ran away in fear to meet a guest called change of mind, they sought each other and had sex like that. The mere physical pleasure to bond two bodies too distant in every possible way, the desperate tentative to squeeze in all of their respective anguishes was all that kept them together.

They left to their bodies the difficult task to reset everything, to change their ever worrying minds in a _tabula rasa_ , taking them back to the start of their individual stories with the same oblivious enthusiasm.

Their respective situations were so different, still, he saw that coming. Maybe it was because he was unable to avoid her taking the wrong route to happiness - because he knew from the beginning her relationship with that man would have been dysfunctional and destructive for her - that he let her stay in his house, on his sheets, doing something that, maybe, if she was just happier and content with herself and her story with her partner, she would have never even considered.

There was nothing hidden underneath their moans, or in those caring hands, or those brash kisses: it was as clear as a swollen cut on the skin.

No strings attached between them.

Everything started in a dark summer afternoon.

He was going back to the Hokage Tower after a hurried lunch when he found her there, motionless under a rooftop, glued to the glass panel of that old grocery store she hated so much with her purchase in one hand and her little daughter on the other.

 _She's probably waiting for the storm to pass_ , he thought at the beginning, but then something caught him off-guard: her dilated pupils, the scent of fear he could feel in her sweat, that ghostly pallor. She was nearly fainting, and she didn't even see him approaching.

They had accomplished so many missions together under storms and sudden blizzards that it felt strangely confusing to see her so frightened by something so ordinary. She saw so many things in her short ninja career, and some of those were surely more terrible than lightning and a heavy rain. That was the reason why he asked her about it, the necessity to understand if it was him, who never really spotted her phobia, or if it was something new, something fresh he knew nothing about.

The first time he asked her, under that rooftop, she stayed silent.

It took a while for her to be able to tell him about it.

When the day came, the brilliant green leaves of spring had turned a gold-ish yellow, and colored the main boulevard of the village with earthy colors.

She told him the truth after giving him back the documents that would have signed Sarada in for her Academy courses.

It was a faint trace of that day on the bridge, in which she saw his hand full of lightning directed towards her face. It was sudden and unavoidable: she started fearing lightning since then, and she still did. She was ashamed to admit it; her blush casting her eyes sideways towards the corner of the room, away from his piercing charcoal glance.

He remembered that day, and the unpleasant twist his stomach suffered after seeing his signature technique directed against his student, subordinate and caring friend.

Images of Rin flashed in front of his eyes, now as then, and the pain was terrible all the same. And that's why he said nothing to her, his tongue blocked in his mouth became dry all of a sudden.

To heal a phobia, they say the patient should expose himself to the cause of it gradually, letting it sink deeper to be recalculated by his psyche. You have to neutralize it, you have to reach that situation in which phobia becomes annoying but still tolerable, in which you're able to control your own emotions and to understand that you can protect yourself against it, that you can make it.

No one could do that job better than him: he was her only choice, since he was the one who taught her beloved that technique.

It was his responsibility, since his moniker was due to that brutal attack: he was her ex teacher, and it was about time he dedicated some of his time teaching her something useful, since he did nothing for the best part of her growth.

So he obliged.

The first time he let his powers roam inside of her it felt like a burning venom was coursing through her veins: his fingers barely touched her wrist, and a delicate jolt of lightning ran all the way through her arm and into her system. She shivered, repulsed by that sensation, but he was delicate and patient, and took a hold of her hand throughout the entire process, letting all of her nerves standing on edge relax, one at a time, slowly, thoroughly.

And it was the first of many others.

It happened gradually, they started to have faith in each other. A few months later, aided by the fact both of them were alone - Sasuke was too caught in his travels and Sarada was growing up so fast, leaving her hand and proceeding in her journey as an adult all alone, going away on missions so frequently - two things became one, and soon they were too engrossed in it to stop what was coming.

Solitude likes to mess with people, we all know that. It forces people together even if they aren't two of the same kind since forever, and this was what happened to those two.

They were two cards from a deck full of many others, who shared nothing, not the color, nor even suits: they just found together as a playing pair and went along.

There were no feelings involved between them: they were just two bodies in free fall, who found themselves colliding at a certain point when their trajectories became entangled; two people who made clear agreements, who were too closed up to let anyone else in, who knew what love tasted like. And because of this, were sure enough they didn't want to experience it again and risk to burn their tongues with another delusion like the one they lived and were living.

That's when they started to think that sexual healing was a healthier solution than alcohol and solitude.

He bit hard into her skin, turned on by her whimpers, then lavished the offended skin with his tongue, licking and sucking the spot he knew she loved so much. They kept wrestling for what seemed like a small eternity, till she finally took control over him, pinning him under her and placing her knees on both sides of his abdomen before closing the gap and pressing her lips against his, feeling her own taste on his tongue.

A long, hot trail of kisses followed the scar he had on his chiseled chest, then the tip of her humid muscle followed the bisection of his abdomen. She felt him twitching pleasurably under her: he was excited to feel so powerless, and he knew she was too, since she always was so demure with her husband and since he liked to do it traditionally.

Having sex with her or having sex all alone was all the same for Sasuke: they were miles apart even when their bodies were joined in the middle.

Deep inside, Sakura was a fighter who had ceased to fight, and those small sparks of light and freedom in her eyes were what he was looking for. Letting the Sakura of the past come alive, finding the route to resurface in her leafy orbs for just half an hour.

This was all that mattered to him, even if he would have never admitted it openly, preferring a lie instead of a truth that spoke too loudly about them.

He was a man who lived in the past, and there, she was still smiling at them all.

"Don't leave any sign on me," she murmured, suppressing a moan when her lips ghosted on his erected member, determined in giving him the same pleasure he'd given her not long before. "Not when _he's_ in the village."

Her tongue came crushing down, licking the base of his penis and going up all the way through, following the engrossed vein on the back of his length. She circled the head with a lazy movement, before closing her mouth on him, letting out a small, appreciative moan and drawing out a trembled breath from the man she was pleasuring.

He loved when she gave him oral. She was wild and had absolutely no self control in what she was doing: pleasuring the other became her only goal, and she was turned on to no end by her own dedication, and this was what made her so skilled and intriguing.

She saw his pupils rolling back in his skull through eyes half closed: his hands twisted in her pink locks, clearing the route against his pelvis and rocking against her, asking her to take him quicker, deeper, hitting the back of her throat with every thrust. Her strangled mewls and those watery eyes, coupled to the depression in her cheeks and the force of her sucking motion, forced him to an abrupt halt after only a few minutes.

His hand wrapped around her wrist and pulled her away, moving her on top of him; her fingers already knew where to go.

She guided his cock under her, brushing the swollen tip against her moist opening and letting out a shuddered breath when she accompanied it inside of her, opening her labia with her fingers to aid him in.

She was dripping wet, and they hadn't even got started. It slid in so easily that the mere sensation of being stretched by his body made her knees feel like butter.

She stilled, the stinging, annoying burn of his invasion still so fresh, while her body tried to cope with the need to accommodate it. Then she started moving slowly, brushing the bundle of nerves on the apex of her femininity against his pelvis, back and forth, over and over, feeling the pleasure setting her loins on fire.

And she started dancing on him: their friction so sweet and perfect she closed her eyes lost in perfect bliss, her lips parted in a soundless intake of breath while her body kept on moving on its own at that infuriating slow pace: it was not enough for him. Sakura felt the body under her stirring and getting up, forcing them to flip and change position. He started driving into her madly, deeply, his speed more demanding: her hands scraped his shoulders so deep she felt the hot stickiness of his blood under her fingers, and his teeth resumed his biting, grazing her neck almost violently.

He was eating her alive and she was absolutely letting him do this. Oh, God, how much she wanted this.

Since when did their relationship become this dirty? Since when did they start drowning their respective sorrow in that wrong, sinful way?

How many other times was she willing to seek that man, betraying her companion, her daughter, her house, and the clan she decided to proudly stitch on the back of her uniform?

How was it possible that the line that divided had blurred so much to be so easy, now, to trespass it?

When exactly did those unshed words become so many to make them deaf to common sense?

She was torn inside, the desire to scream and cry battling against her mewling, her sex spasming around him deliciously, trying to trap him in and never let go. She followed his movements, arching against him like a wave, feeling the sounds of their sexes moving together like long lost companions, filling the room with rhythmic squelching sounds.

"Please… don't leave… signs… on me… please… Kakashi… please…"

Her raptured pleading gained a predatory glance from the man above her. He smiled before coming down again, hands on her wrists, pinning both above her head.

She was so sexy when he called his name like that, that forgetting she belonged to another man was too damn easy.

"Heal yourself later." He smirked, before placing his forehead on her humid lips. "And heal me soon after."

She trembled, the tip of his member hitting a spot so deep and delicate inside of her she felt both pleasure and pain mixed together. Then she felt it: her body shivered when his chakra passed through her for the first time, burning all the way towards her spine, up and up, towards her cerebral cortex.

A sensation she was not able to stop lashed inside of her gut, settling her alarm bells ringing all at once. Something inside snapped violently, leaving tingling burning skin and goosebumps in its wake.

An acute whimper was all he heard, her voice now an octave higher. Her teary eyes squinted shut, her teeth found her bottom lip and squeezed it hard. Her body, overcharged by him, pleaded its partner to repeat that delicious attack to her mental sanity, to subdue all of her nerves in a single shot. He complied and did it again, and again, and again, forcing her muscles to contract and relax spasmodically, her chakra system to accept his presence inside in rippling, uncomfortable waves.

Lightning kept on running inside of her and dissipating all around them with crackling and chirping sounds, voltage low enough not to hurt her, and at the same time high enough to blossom on her skin like a beautiful burnt flower, static electricity splaying her pink hair like an halo on his mattress under his eyes.

Her heart was running wild, thumping in her chest so hard it was difficult to breathe. She tried focusing her chakra to heal his back only to find herself unable to do so, the equilibrium between her physical and mental strength completely overthrown by him, her chakra pathways overloaded.

She could feel the muscle behind her sternum beating so fast that she knew that if he exaggerated with his lightning chakra it could have stopped, transforming a kinky game in a lethal danger.

But he knew what he was doing. She knew he would have never endangered her. He was one of the few people who never failed to protect her from the beginning of her story as a ninja.

That was the extent of their shared intimacy.

She was close and yet so far: she knew her orgasm was inches apart, and her body felt it, too. Her back was taut, her abdominals burnt for the excessive pressure she felt on the inside, her heels pressed in the mattress forcing her pelvis against him, clamping him like a vice, meeting every violent thrust and yet it was not enough, the friction was not enough, all of that was not enough.

He whispered dirty obscenities and encouraging words, his smile against the shell of her ear threatening and amused. He knew she was near and didn't want to let her loose, and she cried his name pathetically, pleaded him to grant her release, to stop hindering her.

And then, when he finally gave in and felt the telltale coiling at the base of his spine informing him the end was so deliciously near, he decided to run and kick her to the other side, afraid to leave her behind while he drifted away. He shifted again, angling his hips up enough to force the woman under him to twist and expose more of herself to his hunger, and she felt her resistance shredding, shattering to pieces.

He came up on one arm, the other finding its way between their joined and sweaty bodies.

He pressed her folds with skilled fingers, and snapped the thin chord that kept her behind. He saw her eyes wide open, her throat choking on a loud cry of pleasure. Something resembling his name rolled down from her lips like a mantra so many times, while her hands slanted against her bulbs, her body tossing and squirming under him while her flesh trembled and squeezed him almost painfully close to his own climax.

And that was enough to jump and fall onto the other side.

He jerked and spasmed deep inside of her a couple of times, feeling her clenching walls dictating the rhythm to follow to ride out his own orgasm, and grunted her name in the pillow, feeling the exquisite shivering of her exhausted body all around him, milking his own seed.

He looked from the corner of his eyes to see the lightning flower he forced on her white body clawing up towards her slender face, claiming possession of her collarbones and neck.

But that was just an empty, trembling shell: Sakura Haruno was there no more.

There was Sakura Uchiha beside him, under him, and with every intake of breath, her reality came crashing down on her, chewing her stomach in guilt: the collar she felt around her neck got tighter and tighter, choking her breath.

She couldn't stay: she had a place to return to, a family to attend, a daughter to take care of, a man that she couldn't dare to call with his birth name. Danna-sama was what he conceded when she was referring to him, the coldness of that title reminding her that she was a submissive wife, and that she had to be the one waiting for him, and not the one seeking him out in his darkness.

A title that reminded her that she had to be grateful that he had chosen her to be the starter chain ring of his reborn clan.

Sorrow and anguish were stuck so deep inside of her, now, it looked like they had blossomed somewhere under her skin, in a far unreachable place, like those lightning flowers.

She got dressed in the dark, boneless, forceless. With time, acceptance starts becoming more bearable: the decision to give up on her own life to heal a person that didn't want to be healed, not from her at least, was heavy on her shoulders, but she didn't want to show it.

Outside, a far, loud rumbling informed her a storm was coming; clouds were drifting in the evening sky, covering everything in grey.

She fisted her hand a couple of times, feeling the dizziness of her tingling arm being subdued: small ruptured capillaries on her forearm, on the exact point his hand had pinned her down, opened in a branch-like pattern, up towards her shoulder and down towards her wrist.

Chakra glowed green, and the small scar whitened under her worried glance, soon becoming a faint silvery shadow made of new skin.

The tremble was still there, but it was lighter with every passing minute.

He went rather hard on her, this time, she thought for a moment, her mind and heart totally cold to what they did, feeling her left arm going tense at odd and uncomfortable intervals.

When he used her like that, discharging all of his powers on her like she was some twisted sort of grounding wire, it was because he wasn't focused enough.

 _Something is troubling him_ , she said to herself, closing up the qipao dress she wore, sliding into it like a wild rabbit in her own hole, before putting her pants on.

She had learnt to know that man in the darkness of his room, in the shadows, when the air between them filled up with ozone and the shaky flashes of lightning.

She knew him when lights were out, and she knew him more than the man who had given her his own surname and who lived with her under the same roof, lights on. And that was sad enough.

She once told him he could have talked to her if he did want to, but he never did, and she was grateful for that: she didn't want to hear someone's else problems when she was already stuffed with her own.

Being silent made anything easier, aseptic: the less they talk, the better it was.

You can't heal from something that is missing, she learnt: you can adapt to it, you can live without it and accept it, but it seemed her daughter's father wasn't supposed to do it. He wasn't able to. She learnt it on her own expense, giving birth to Sarada, showering her with the love she wanted to give him instead.

No one can save himself on his own, they say, but if the one you want to save, doesn't want to be saved?

She looked at herself in the mirror of his bathroom, grouping her hair on top of her head to be sure her neck was clear from any sign. She touched one of her naked lobes.

He appeared soon after behind her, his glance void of any unnecessary feeling, neutral, plain, like if what they did in the bedroom meant absolutely nothing, like if having sex in that wild way and finding themselves almost naked at a few meters was an every day fact.

She started to think that a training session at ground three and a mind-blowing fuck was basically the same thing for that man.

She never really understood how he was able to appear so unfazed in front of those things, but she would have admitted easily she was jealous of him. She always thought that absent expression was due to the mask always covering his features, but now that he was totally naked in front of her, his capacity was faltering, borderline disturbing.

Maybe that was what you become, when the number of lives you'd taken was so greater than the number of missions accomplished. He was a killer who slayed so many human lives in his long career that maybe the role of Hokage, more than a sentence, had been a benediction for him, for those ten years of ruling.

He left an earring in her open palm, before washing his face with cold water.

"It was between the sheets," he stated, his voice stifled by his towel, his stony glance focused on their image in the mirror. "Be careful, next time."

"Thanks."

She put on her white lab coat, and pressed her fingers on the dark rings under her eyes with a sigh, trying to soften her sleep deprived expression. His glance stayed on her for more than a few seconds, this time.

He was studying her.

Even though he looked so unfazed, he was a man who could read other's feelings with impossible ease.

He was like a comfort woman. It was the oldest profession in the world, and he was just better at it than those who did it for work. He knew how to pleasure a woman, he was patient and discreet and surely had his way with words.

And for her, it was always free of any emotional luggage.

Now, that's what she would have called a bargain, if irony hadn't dumped her sorry ass on the cold ground for that day.

"There's something wrong… isn't it?"

Again that neutral look: this time, though, there was a soft hint of comprehension and serenity. He was an accomplice, not an hostile enemy. He would have heard her without judging, like he always does, and always did. He was always the person you have faith in because he was unable to betray you, the one who could have avoided answering you, and whose silence was good all the same, as much as his most honest replies.

She launched a tired glance and half-hearted smile. She really wanted to vomit anything out, but her time was running thin, and she was walking on eggshells. Her lie was becoming too big, and she knew that if she stayed too long, he would have gotten suspicious.

"You too."

He moved his glance on himself and felt her petite hand reaching the space between his shoulder blades. It was icy cold and tingling - the feeling of her soothing chakra in his system, healing the scratch she left on him. It painted the wall behind him of an aqueous shade of green.

"Need to talk?"

She closed her eyes, her face steeled.

"Next time. It's late. This _hospital emergency_ lasted too long," she murmured, turning on her heels. "I have to go back home and prepare dinner for both Sarada and Sasuke."

He saw her in the perimeter of his vision before opening the shower cabinet, telling her nothing else. He didn't turn when she saluted him off before she went.

"Where do I place your spare key?" she shouted.

"Same place as always."

She wandered through the empty streets of the village at a slow, relaxed pace. Lamps in the streets started to light up, a glowing contrast against the cloudy grey sky, and the last warm breeze of summer filtered between her legs, opening her coat and advising her the storm had come and was ready to unleash on her head.

Summer was slowly fading to autumn.

She increased her walk, reaching the wooden gate that delimited the Uchiha estate and got in, quietly, the small pattering of rain becoming more and more heavier on the rooftops.

They say lightning never strikes twice.

She really didn't know who said something like this, but it was pure bullshit.

Sarada came to greet her as soon as she heard the locks giving in, that toothy smile of hers still in place on that pretty round face. She hugged her tightly, asking her how her day went, helping her mother with her coat.

"Why so late?" she asked. Her innocence felt like a slap on her face; she caressed her inky black hair with a maternal smile.

"An emergency," she muttered tiredly, hoping she sounded more convincing to her ears than her own. "They asked me to help them out at the hospital. I'm sorry for being late, honey."

Sasuke glanced at her, his right eye piercing through her.

The left one containing his Rinnegan hidden under his long bangs was invisible, an unseen medal of all the pain he caused to others.

He was studying her answer: he faked a smile, one of those useless smirks he made to let her know that living in that house _wasn't that bad_ , but that was still pretty far from his ideal of wellbeing. And that soon, too soon, he would leave again for one of his journeys, because it was easier to keep them at arms-length than mingling with them like any other family.

His family was in the past, in a different place, in a different time, with different people, now scattered like ashes in the wind.

 _Whatever you do, as long as you take care of Sarada, clean this house and play the part of the wife you wanted so much, is fine with me:_ that was the meaning she read in that smirk, but this time it hurt less then the first times, in which she waited for her romanticized love story to unfold before her.

Their situation was just similar to the one lived by the main characters of the well-known hedgehogs' dilemma: they couldn't get to close to one another, because they ended up wounding each other. So they stood their distance, glancing at themselves from afar.

She neared him and kissed him softly on the crown of his head: love was still there, somewhere within, but had grown weak, transformed, withered. It had consumed her like a flame, a lifelong love who burnt her slowly, thoroughly, left waiting in front of a wooden gate.

And yet, it was still there.

Sakura's pregnancy lasted longer than their intimacy.

They had dinner together in a pleasurable silence: Sarada was a teenager now. She tried to reach for him, she really did, but it was too cold where dad had hidden himself. Her young hands couldn't catch him in the darkness, and his arms never really felt warm around her petite form. She gave up on the idea of not having a father during her childhood, but not yet at the idea of having none.

She was the conjunction between two people who never really had been a couple from the start: those words he muttered the first time she met him, those in which he admitted openly she was the link that bonded them together, now changed color, like the indicator of a chemical reaction that reached neutrality.

It wasn't a positive thing, but at that time, when you are just a child and all the things you know about your father are all the sweet lies your mother told you about his absence, it sounded like they were coated gold.

It took a long while to start figuring out the real meaning of those words.

She was the only thing that prevented them from separating, a sort of cheap glue that stuck her parents together, a knot in the plot, an unexpected consequence. They were together because of her. She entered in the equation, and now it was too complex to go back and simplify anything, admitting there was no basement under those thin paper walls.

Admitting there was nothing to fix, _nothing at all_.

Seeing her mother, Sarada had known the real meaning behind the word love. And it was not there, on that table during dinner, or on that couch with his father. It was in her childhood, in that caring hand on her head, in those blankets she tucked her under, in the career she abandoned for her, in the bento she prepared for school, in the laughs and many smiles she gave her even when she was torn inside and wanted to smash anything to pieces. She kept the tears and gave her all the rest, and that was the highest expression of the word love. She gave really anything she got, she consumed herself for her and she would always be grateful for this.

Their family was still, a broken engine where love ran out: they were stuck in the middle, and for every step they made towards the idea of family, soon after there were two steps back towards solitude, and all that remained there in that house were three people who lived under the same roof without having anything to share.

They were stuck just in between, too drawn in the middle to get separated, and too far to be united.

They went to sleep, content with that small slice of normal life they shared on the vigil of his new journey: it was so rare to be together like that, it was almost precious.

It was raining outside, and she was less afraid of lightning now.

They say lightning never strikes twice: it's false. It's something that happens once in a lifetime, but could still happen. A shot of thousand of ampere in a fraction of second that pierces through you, burns you, stops your heart and resets your nervous system, and most of the time there's no going back from that.

In those stormy nights, she wasn't able to sleep with her face towards him. When the flash of lightning lit his profile, it revived those frightening moments on that bridge.

And he knew that.

She accepted his absence, and he accepted her back during storms, and that was the silent oath they shared.

They had sex that night, and he knew she didn't want to and was faking her orgasm, but he didn't care about that.

He knew there were no words that could have made those memories more bearable, that could have transformed his murdering intent in something else less destructive. The lava under her, the Kyuubi, his Genjutsu, who made her live through an endless nightmare: everything just stood there, and all the ashes that had been thrown over those burning pits didn't make the burn less painful, didn't smother the flames soon under.

And during those stormy days, her memories stirred again.

This was their relationship: these were the unspoken words that talked too much, the skeleton in the closet they were too afraid to open and clean out. Their relationship was embodied in a child they hoped would have fixed the many mistakes they had done in the past, but it was so obvious it was deemed to fail that even trying it out seemed like a foolish dangerous game.

Sasuke looked at her back with a tired eye, his orgasm now fading away, and squinted when he saw the singular burn etched on it: a fractal, chaotic scar marred her back, climbing up onto her vertebral column, linking her buttock to her shoulder blade where it opened up like a flower of fresh swollen skin.

There was a scorching lightning flower.

How many times did his Chidori leave that same marking on his arm, during those long trainings with Kakashi? How many times did he have to cover his arms with bandages to conceal that annoying scar?

He wasn't the one who made it: he knew she was afraid of him.

An hand stretched: cold fingertips grazed the singed skin, and she stiffened under his touch.

And he knew from her clear body language, from her silence, now incredibly thicker and suffocating.

They say lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but it's just extremely rare.

And if you're really that unfortunate, and you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time and you got thunderstruck… you still have a chance to make it. You can still manage to survive… after a while, pain begins to fade. The shock will wear off, you will start to recover from something you didn't even see coming, but that surely was one hell of a hit, and anything will start anew.

You'll have a scar, in memory of what you'd been able to overcome, and it will be the sign that will show yourself and the rest of the world you still had a shot at surviving.

Sasuke closed his eyes, his throat now was too constricted over his windpipe to let saliva get down. He could still see the pattern of that marking underneath his lids, the awareness of what she couldn't tell so clear it was like a thunder he wasn't able to dodge.

He turned onto his side, looking at the last traveling uniform left out of his bag, the one he reserved for great occasions, his early morning runaways, abandoned on a crutch like a dead body hanged on a branch.

He got up and dressed in the shadows: silent steps accompanied him towards the fusuma, under her eyes. He would leave before sunrise, he decided.

Her dilated pupils followed his back till he disappeared from her sight, and something unclenched inside of her stomach.

The sound of the front door closing opened her throat, and the first of many gulps followed soon after: heavy, salty tears escaped from the border of her eyes, drenching the soft cotton of her pillow while she wallowed in sighs and moans.

Lightning could definitely strike twice, but if odds are in your favor, you could still have a shot at surviving: still, I bet you're not that willing to experience it again.

You'll never be the same after such an event.

You just can't be.

And that's the reason why one, generally, is more than enough.


End file.
